Tag Archives: college survey courses

Anybody who’s taught a history class can probably sympathize with the points raised here and here. In some ways, it’s harder to teach the material you know really well than it is to teach material outside your immediate area of expertise.

As John Fea says, when I’m teaching the stuff I’m really into, “I always leave the lecture hall frustrated. As I walk back to my office I often obsess about everything I did not have time to cover.” When you’re passionate about a particular topic, you want to give it the coverage you know it deserves. Of course, this is usually impossible, especially with a survey course. As a result, you leave the classroom feeling disappointed with yourself, and then you start wondering about whether you’re teaching any of the material adequately.

The lectures I’m most content with are the ones where my understanding of the subject falls into a sort of middle zone, where I’m familiar enough with the material to be comfortable but not so thoroughly schooled in it that I’m conscious of how much I’m leaving out.

Maybe we should all think about replacing our usual textbooks with something like Robert Remini’s A Short History of the United States. Students would still be getting their background and context from a distinguished and reputable historian, but at a fraction of the cost of the glossy, illustration-heavy volumes put out by textbook publishers. They’d also save time and money that could be spent on other reading material, material which would demonstrate what historians do and how they do it.

Or maybe we should ditch the background, textbook-type reading completely. I’m gradually becoming convinced that survey-level history texts aren’t just overpriced—they’re a little superfluous. When I teach survey courses, I spend most of my time lecturing on important historical trends, covering critical events, providing context, and so on. In other words, I’m doing the very same thing the textbook is doing, except I’m doing it verbally. Is the textbook really necessary when it does nothing but elaborate on the same material we cover in lecture?

In the past, I’ve tried to save my students’ money by replacing the supplementary source reader with material from the Internet History Sourcebook or another online primary source collection, and assigning the main text as the only book to buy. Maybe I’ve been doing it backwards. Perhaps we should all ditch our textbooks instead, and assign a good primary source reader along with an accessible monograph or two. Thus we’d have lectures for background coverage, and assigned reading to learn interpretation and historical thinking. Some professors have been doing this for a long time. Is it time to take that approach mainstream?

I once heard my pastor (who also happens to be my uncle) quote another minister to the effect of, “The preacher’s job is to reach up and take it down from the top shelf, and put it in people’s hands.” The preacher, in other words, must not only have a certain level of expertise in his subject matter, but also the ability to translate it into a usable form for people whose expertise is in some other area. When I worked in museums, I used to see my job in pretty much the same way. The public historian’s job is to take it down from the top shelf and put it in people’s hands.

There’s an unfortunate tendency in academia to look down on public historians, as if curators, park rangers, and their colleagues at museums and other institutions are engaged in a less demanding enterprise than those who earn a paycheck from teaching and publishing. But in many ways, the demands placed on the public historian are greater. The public historian, like his academic counterpart, must be able to conduct original research and make sense of the relevant secondary literature—to reach the top shelf. But his success will also depend on his ability to get that stuff down from the top shelf and into the public’s hands. That’s what distinguishes the public historian from the ivory tower historian.

A few days ago, however, it occurred to me that although I’m not in the museum field anymore, my job still consists of taking things down from the top shelf. I make a living by teaching college survey courses. My audience isn’t composed of colleagues or apprentices; it’s made up of individuals from a variety of backgrounds, each with different levels of interest and differing aptitudes when it comes to the study of the past. I’ve therefore decided that teaching a college survey course is essentially an exercise in public history.

Lately the historical Interwebs has been talking about the new Grant bio by H.W. Brands. I read his life of Andrew Jackson several years ago and thought it was pretty good, even if the availability of Robert Remini’s one-volume abridgment version of his multi-volume work made another popular Jackson bio seem a little superfluous.

The Grant and Jackson books are both part of a series of biographies which will constitute a complete history of the United States, with Brands using each individual exemplifying a particular era. It’s a pretty interesting idea.

I wonder if you could do the same thing for a survey course, organizing each lecture around the life of some historical figure. Could students learn history just by getting acquainted with individuals whose life stories reflect their respective time periods or subjects? Here are a few possibilities:

Pocahontas for early colonial Anglo-Indian relations with her first encounters with the Jamestown colonists, her capture, baptism, marriage, and eventual death

Jacob Leisler for the evolution of the colonial-English relationship in the late seventeenth century

Jonathan Edwards for the intellectual/religious developments of the early eighteenth century

John Adams for the Revolutionary and Federalist eras, with the emergence of his commitment to independence and the development of his ideas on government

John Sevier for the trans-Appalachian frontier, with his career as Indian fighter, leader of a dissident separatist movement, land speculator, and state governor

Of course, his lessons didn’t change on the day of the attacks, but once students started showing up who had completely forgotten about it — “18-year-olds who were about seven when 9/11 happened” — he knew he had to teach it. But there are only so many hours of instruction in the semester.

That meant he had to start making cuts in his lesson plans. Take Watergate. Once, he used to spend an entire lecture on the political scandal, but now, he covers it in 10 to 15 minutes. “The New Deal is another really good example,” he says. “When I first started teaching, I think I had three lectures on it.” Now he’s down to two, and that’s changed the way he teaches, too. “I try to do it differently so that I won’t overwhelm people with lots and lots of facts. And then they’ll be able to understand more history, hopefully, through only having to know a little less.”

It’s our first week back to class at LMU, which means it’s once again time to deliver my little beginning-of-the-semester spiel at the first class meeting. I’ve developed a tradition of opening my survey classes with a somewhat crude metaphor.

Imagine that a complete college-level education in history is a big shopping mall, with a variety of stores that cater to different needs and tastes—Ancient Rome, the history of Nazi Germany, the American West, the history of women or warfare, and so on. Students who decide to major in history, to devote their college careers to the study of the human past, get to go into these stores and spend some time browsing, trying on the merchandise and perhaps finding a few items that suit them.

A gen-ed survey course, like the ones I’m teaching this semester, is different. In a first-year world history class, we usually don’t spend enough time on any one subject for students to get much of a feel on it. Students thus don’t get to do much of what historians actually do, which is developing interpretations to answer questions about the past. A survey course is all about getting oriented to the general contours of human history as a whole, just as the word “survey” in another sense denotes scoping out the general contours of a physical landscape.

If the upper-level elective courses are like stores in a mall, then a world history survey class is more like a mall directory sign, which tells you where the stores are located and what you can find in them.

This distinction is significant to me as a teacher, because it reminds me that I will inevitably have to make sacrifices in content due to the nature of a survey course. But I explain it to my students because I don’t want them to confuse the experience of taking a survey course with the experience of doing history.

It’s a tragic irony that the very classes in which we’re able to engage non-history majors are the very same classes in which students don’t get as many opportunities to see what makes history so captivating. In survey courses, there’s so much material to be covered that you can’t delve deeply into the kinds of problems and issues that occupy the attention of historians and advanced-level history students. The students who really get to have fun with history are the ones who take the upper-level electives, and yet students who sign up for those classes have often done so because they already know how much fun they can have doing it.

I do my best in my survey classes to try to give students a taste of the discipline of history, even though most of our time will necessarily be spent doing the less appealing work of laying a foundation of basic historical knowledge. But I realize that many of them won’t be inclined take a history class beyond the gen-ed requirements, and thus won’t discover that history is more than mastering general concepts and facts. That’s why I spend a few minutes on the first day explaining my shopping mall metaphor. The orientation that we do in survey courses is necessary and I try to make it compelling, but if possible, I want students to use my introductory class to find a few stores that intrigue them, so that when it’s time to take some electives they might consider going in for a closer look at the merchandise.

One of the mainstays of history survey courses are collections of primary source excerpts that profs assign to supplement the textbook. The excerpts are invariably short, since the only practical way to expose students to a wide array of important primary documents is to cut them up into tiny little bits.

I’ve secretly wondered much students really benefit by reading these little snippets. When it comes to shorter works like the Declaration of Independence, the excerpt system works pretty well. But some longer sources don’t take to dismemberment. How much insight can you really get from a few out-of-context paragraphs of Ben Franklin’s autobiography or the Lincoln-Douglas debates? It’s like driving a golf cart through an art gallery at top speed while trying to catch glimpses of the paintings along the way. You can assign longer selections of fewer works, of course, but that’s a trade-off.

That’s the thing about teaching a survey course. It’s all about trade-offs.